The actor/singer/producer Paul Nicholas has had an astonishingly full and varied career from the 1960s to date. His recent tongue-in-cheek quote on being an ageing star made me laugh:
“I used to get young girls hanging around the stage door, now it’s women in their 60s and 70s. You have to walk quite slowly when you’re being stalked these days.”
… this is why I so like Berger & Wyse:
This from Lorna Wallace’s winning entry to a Burn’s night poetry competition held in New Zealand entitled: ‘A Scot’s Lament fur her American Fellows (Oan their election of a tangerine gabshite walloper)‘. A coruscating critique of Donald Trump in which his demeanour is described thus:
Poutin’, glaikit through this farce,
His mooth wis pursed up like an arse,
His Tangoed coupon glowin’ like
A skelped backside.
The entire poem can be heard or read here.
According to the Castle Hotel, Huntly …
… unlike grouse who think they’re Stirling bleedin’ Moss. And ptarmigan, just don’t get me started on ptarmigan …
The rugby coach and big girl panties …
There was a refreshingly honest touchline interview during today’s televised rugby match between Saracens and Exeter.
Under a new directive interpreting the punishment for various acts of foul play, Sarries had seen a player sent off for a dangerous, head-high tackle. Alex Sanderson, the Sarries coach and an advocate of more stringent policing of dangerous tackles, not only acknowledged the red card to be fully justified, but also commented that he would have had no complaint if a second Sarries player had also been carded at the same time.
His quote reflected a degree of irony vis-à-vis his advocacy for a safer game:
“Karma’s come back and bit me in the a**e“.
I know it’s juvenile (but it makes me laugh). I know it’s not really funny (even though it makes me laugh). I know I should have grown out of it by now (but it still makes me laugh) …
They say that languages are alive and constantly evolve, so here is my addition to the UK lexicon preceded by its root in standard UK English:
Well, I did lusten excessively to Kirsty Young this morning, but that was solely to hear Bruce Springsteen on Desert Island Discs. And talking of ‘The Boss’, ’tis a little known fact that I once re-worked some of his lyrics in the days when I organised a series of get-togethers over coffee between colleagues at work – the SciOps Coffee Club – and advertised them with a series of posters.
One such poster was my take on the artwork for Springsteen’s pivotal ‘Born in the USA’ album that was transmogrified into ‘Baked in the MLA’. Literary licence allowed me to pretend that his song ‘Born to Run’ had actually debuted in that album as ‘Born to Bake’.
Here’s the original (modelled by Springsteen):
… and this was my take on it (modelled by ‘Britney’ Springsteen , aka Firstborn):
Postscript: this post was prepared on a smartphone. Bad choice. Its keyboard is not conducive to writing a lot of text and its capacity to include even mis-typed text into its dictionary of personalised ‘predictive’ text means that I shall now and forever think of Bruce Springsteen as Beery Sorungsteeb! Very Hitchkiker’s Guide …
The previous post was a bit too ‘heavy’, so here’s something a bit lighter. Berger and Wyse have had more misses than hits recently, but this week’s effort in the Graun is more like it:
A nice Graun interview with Christopher Lloyd (‘Doc’ Brown in Back to the Future). He seems as eccentric in life as the ‘Doc’ does in the film.
I first remember Lloyd as one of the actors in the sitcom ‘Taxi’ from the late 70s and early 80s where he played the drug-addled rôle of ‘Reverend Jim’ Ignatowski.
One of the online comments to the Graun article reprised the following exchange from an episode from 1980. It made me laugh, particularly as despite reading it 30-odd years after its original run, Reverend Jim’s lines played back in my mind in the same woozy, befuddled and bewildered tones that Lloyd brought to the character, so not so much a quote as an excerpt:
Elaine: Jim, you changed your name TO Ignatowski?
Jim: Yeah, you know … it was the 60s and everyone was changing their names to stuff like Sunshine, Free, Moon Unit…
Alex: Well Jim, why Ignatowski?
Jim: Say it backwards.
Bobby: Iskwotangi.
Jim: Uh oh, that’s not even close to Starchild, is it?
Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer have been quite earnestly described as the comedic equivalent of the European avant-garde Dadaist art movement of the early 20th century. (In fact Reeves, an art school graduate, presented BBC4’s recent ‘Gaga for Dada’ programme).
In short this means people either ‘get them’ or they don’t. I do, but I’m the only person I know that does. Hence no-one else that I know has watched more than a smidgen of any episode of their TV series ‘House of Fools‘; a programme that I found to be laugh-out-loud funny.
All of which means that no-one reading this is likely to understand why I laughed at Vic Reeves’ quote when he recently discussed a cruise ship advert that he had just seen:
‘The fjords – we aren’t the best cruise ship, but we go from Dover.’ I thought: well that’s not far. And I’m very fond of pickled fish.
… just don’t call it surreal
Postscript: I’ve just realised that one of my favourite jokes is (i) Dadaist not Surrealist and (ii) consequently, it no longer makes sense:
“… and now the football results, Real Madrid 3, Surreal Madrid Fish“
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